Tuesday, March 04, 2014

So long again, Chicago Daily News

On March 4, 1978, the presses fell silent for the last time at the Chicago Daily News, an iconic and crusading newspaper that was unable to adapt to changing times. The following article, which originally appeared here in 2005, is reprinted as a reminder of what happens when a paper runs out of readers, revenues and ideas.

"It's fun being the publisher when things are going well," squeaked the young man who stumbled awkwardly to the top of a battered desk in the unusually silent newsroom of the Chicago Daily News. "But it's no fun today."

Swallowing a nervous giggle, Marshall Field V cleared his throat and read the assembled staff the short, typewritten death warrant of one of the most distinguished newspapers in American history.

An agonizing month later, on March 4, 1978, the Daily News signed off with the jaunty banner, "So long, Chicago."

The line was written by the late nightside copy desk chief, Tom Gavagan, a chain-smoking, working-class Irishman who seemed to own only two shirts -- one in burnt orange, the other in avocado green. The tears in Gav's eyes weren't from the smoke.

Although it happened 35 years ago, the story is worth telling today, because many of the zany, brainy people who made that paper sing aren't here to talk about it any more. They were my mentors, comrades and friends, and I cherish their memories.

But this isn't just ancient history. It is a valuable reminder to today's media companies of what happens when you run out of readers, revenues and ideas all at the same time.

The Daily News, like most afternoon newspapers, succumbed at the age of 102 to a declining audience and rising expenses.

Its readers had moved on. On to the suburbs, where delivery trucks couldn't reach them with a paper that didn't come off the press until afternoon. On to the sofa, where they favored Three's Company on television.

There were no home computers, no Internet, no iPods and no cellphones to get between our readers and us in 1978. Still, circulation dropped. The management was changed. Circulation dropped. We redesigned the paper. Circulation dropped. We tinkered with the product. Circulation dropped.

In the end, there was nothing left to do. Some 300 people lost their jobs, and Chicago lost a great newspaper.

The Daily News, in its best days, was a cutting-edge conscience in conservative Chicago, a husky, brawling town that wasn't always ready for reform. The paper stood fast against official incompetence and government corruption and stood tall for civil rights and the little guy. For years, the Daily News stubbornly held its price to a penny, so as to be affordable to laborers heading home from work.

It was one of the first newspapers to have foreign correspondents, to print photographs or to cover that new-fangled medium, radio. Its widely syndicated coverage won 13 Pulitzer Prizes, including three for meritorious public service.

6 Comments:

Alan,Your piece brings back memories when I had to tell my staff at The Houston Post on April 15, 2005, that this was the last day the presses would run. Reasons were different but emotion on that day was not. Very sad. Although I had been there two years, there were several who had served for over 40 years. Michele Chaboudyformer VP Marketing for The Post

There is never a discussion that maybe the quality of the writing and relevance of the narrative is what put print in jeopardy. investigative reporting, the romantic longing historical journalism, may not be what the culture needs to reclaim democracy and the common good.

Enough blaming the internet, suburbs, ADHD, sound bite. when the profession take a harder look.

The Daily News closed a year and a half before I graduated J school. Its closing effected the entire Midwest as jobs that might have gone to newly graduated journalists went to those with more experience.

Luckily, I left for the west coast where the newspaper market was better and joined Hearst's Herald Examiner… which closed in 1989, though I had by then left for Copley's Santa Monica Outlook… which eventually closed in 1998, but then I was in magazines (all of which still publish).

I got my start in journalism while still in college as a part-time editorial assistant to Irv Kupcinet at the Sun-Times, courtesy of feature editor Bob Zonka, who was teaching me newswriting at Columbia College at the time. Some time shortly threafter, Zonka returned from a brief vacation to discover that he'd been replaced. The Sun-Times management couldn't wait until he got back. That was my first taste of the duplicity of the Field regime.

By the time I got back from grad school at Mizzou three years later, the Sun-Times wasn't hiring anyone straight out of school anymore, and City News Bureau had frozen up while I was away, with nobody rotating through the beats anymore or moving to the daily papers. I should have seen the writing on the wall then, because ever since, I've seen a market in decline in Chicago, with jobs constantly lost. The internet was just the final insult.

I am also reminded that but a few years later, Marshall Field V told his staff at the Sun-TImes that he would never, ever "sell the Sun-Times to Rupert Murdoch or anyone like him" -- and then proceeded to do exactly that about a month later. And the Sun-Times staff had to hear about it from a Tribune reporter who had been at a meeting of one of the business clubs at the city when Field first mentioned it. I have damned his name ever since, and I feel sorry for those staffers who are left. But they're still doing a better job than the Trib, where the managing editor headed an afternoon entertainment handout for commuters before becoming the ME. Seriously.

About Me

Alan D. Mutter is perhaps the only CEO in Silicon Valley who knows how to set type one letter at a time.
Mutter began his career as a newspaper columnist and editor at the Chicago Daily News and later rose to City Editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1984, he became No. 2 editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.
He left the newspaper business in 1988 to join InterMedia Partners, a start-up that became one of the largest cable-TV companies in the U.S.
Mutter was the COO of InterMedia when he moved to Silicon Valley in 1996 to join the first of the three start-up companies he led as CEO.
The companies he headed were a pioneering Internet service provider and two enterprise-software companies.
Mutter now is a consultant specializing in corporate initiatives and new media ventures involving journalism and technology. He ordinarily does not write about clients or subjects that will affect their interests. In the rare event he does, this will be fully disclosed.
Mutter also is on the adjunct faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.